A testing site is up and running at http://forum.hkjug.org/forum/. Whoever see this post may go to register an account and try. I'll clear all user accounts and other data before the production launch, so please feel free to try in whatever way you like. The production link will be http://hkjug.org/forum (it doesn't work as of now)
There will be a newsgroup at nntp://news.hkjug.org (also not working yet). The NNTP is shown as started in the Jive Forums console but it doesn't listen to the 119 port at all. Probably I need to go for support.
The Jive Forums is suppose to be quite easy to setup and it should be quite mature. However, you may find some odd behavior or even exception in the user account registration, login/logout, update profile pages. The reason is Jive Forums does not fully support LDAP by default. For example, it can't register new account to LDAP. As a result, I have to program the user and group interface, my implementation possibly introduced some bugs.
In details, I have to implement my own GroupManager, UserManager, and Authentication Factory of Jive Forums to talk to my Apache Directory Server. The forum software has special requirement like it needs both a numeric and String user Id, and it got special profile fields like isEmailVisible for storing in the directory. So I have to customize the LDAP schema in order for Jive Forums to be fully functional.
Some of the potential exception page you may see is related to Spring. My LDAP code uses Spring LDAP template. Spring LDAP template, similar to JDBC Template/DAO, has an "elegant" design that it catches all exception and throw its own RuntimeException. It's really easy to develop and the code are clean as I don't need to catch exceptions. They are really genius. If the users do not enter wrong password and any lookup are always successful, there won't be any exception and it's a decent solution. But ... ....
Another major piece of work, which is not done yet, is the interface customization.
